Ever needed to get from one location around Middle Earth and you're not a hunter or can't bribe one to port you around? StableGuy gives you a quick and easy method of using the available Stable Masters to show you shortest path from A to B.

Simply select the starting location and where you want to go and StableGuy will show you the shortest route by calculating the minimum number of hops to travel from A to B thus minimising cost and travel time.

Features
Simple drop-down menu to select From and To locations.

Incorparates waypoints to run to manually to get to the nearest Stable Master where no direct link exists. eg. You can be in Inner Caras Galadhon, but there's no direct Stable Master route to Caras Galadhon (no idea why!). StableGuy will direct you to run to co-ordinates at the south gate, then on to the Stable Master to continue the journey.

Works between regions and zones throughout Middle Earth. eg. You want to travel from Echad Dunnan in Eregion to The Vinyards of Lorien in Lothlorien. StableGuy will show all the Stable Masters and Waypoints into Moria and out the other side all the way to the Vinyards.

Not only does StableGuy show locations for all the StableMasters, but also includes all entrances to raids, campfires and mustering horns, milestones, and spawn locations for Warbands throughout Wildermore, East & West Rohan for good measure!

Limitations
StableGuy will suggest the shortest route based on all known connections between Stable Masters, even though you may not have previously unlocked the suggested Stable Master. You will need to discover the Stable Master in that location in order to use it in the future by either speaking with the Stable Master or completing the corresponding deed.

StableGuy does not calculate actual time taken to travel from A to B because paths and tracks do not interconnect in a straight line. Roads can wind and twist and horses/goats vary in speed, therefore affecting the actual time taken to travel.

StableGuy always uses Swift Travel as a priority over normal travel to shorten the number of hops, even though this may not be available until Swift Travel has been unlocked by either discovery or completing deeds. Misleading results may occur if you do not have Swift Travel unlocked for the suggested locations, but will all fall into place once you have them unlocked.

If you can't see the suggested Stable Master on your list, it means you haven't discovered it yet. This should not pose too much of a problem because most quests are fairly localised at the lower levels. StableGuy comes in particularly handy for doing quests that require running around all over the place such as the tavern challenge quests.

Future Plans
Find a way of eliminating Stable Masters not unlocked yet from the route, and/or an option for non-subscribers that don't have swift travel available. This will require abit more time to go back over all the routes and add non-swift travel routes as well, but need to work out how I'm going to link towns up as alot of them only have swift travel routes and no slow travel... kind of defeats the purpose as you wont be able to use the Stable Master to get around! You'll have to run manually. Any suggestions?

Add new zones as they become available.

Add more places of interest (send me your suggestions to be included!)

Automatically detect closest Stable Master to your current location and suggest as starting point... hmmm Pythagoras Theorum and some Triangulation will come in handy here. Lucky I paid some attention in math class.

Installation
Ensure the file path is: "\The Lord of the Rings Online\Plugins\RadicusPlugins\StableGuy" if installing manually or use Plugin Compendium to install to the correct folder.

Is there a way to send the plugin output to a specific chat tab, rather than just general?

There may be some minor confusion between chat tabs and channels. "General" is a tab. "Standard" is a chat channel. Each chat tab can have one or more channels displayed on it. Radicus is correct about how Lua is implemented and that it can only programmatically output text to the Standard or Error channels without additional user interaction. However, if you want the output from the plugin (and all other information in the Standard channel in a separate tab, just create a new tab, right click the tab and select "Standard" in the chat filters. You can then also remove Standard from the General tab and the text will no longer appear in General but will still appear in the new tab. You should be aware though that plugins are not the only thing that display in the Standard channel so you might still want Standard selected in the General tab, it all depends on your reasons for wanting the plugin output separate.

Note, plugins can also write to the "Error" channel so you might want to enable that channel in the chat filters for your new tab as well.

As far as I understand, I don't think it's possible to that because the Turbine.Shell.WriteLine() command will only post text to your own window, and the only way to insert a /wd or /glff that is not treated as "text" is to bind it to a button, which means that you need to press a button multiple times to send each location one line at a time.

I could write a loop that binds each location to a button and when it is pressed it changes it to the next location and so on until the chain is displayed.

eg...

bind 1: /wd location a
bind 2: /wd location b
bind 3: /wd location c

etc until all the locations have been displayed

I did try adding the channel in a dropdown list, but it would only display the list to my own console... it actually shows "/wd location info" to my own console rather than to world chat.

I guess they built that into the writeln command so that people cant spam the chat the channels

This plugin has a bug in it that prevents it from working if it has not previously created the settings file (which is always true the first time you run it on a new machine). It must have been introduced after the author and most users created their settings file with a previous version of the plugin.

You can fix the problem yourself by editing the file RadicusPlugins/StableGuy/Window.lua. Change the third line in that file from